Effect on Comprehension of Preposed versus Postposed Adverbial Phrases

• Published in: Journal of psycholinguistic research Vol. 43; no. 6; pp. 771 - 790
• Main Authors: Colonna, Saveria, Charolles, Michel, Sarda, Laure, Pynte, Joël
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Boston Springer US 01-12-2014; Springer; Springer Nature B.V; Springer Verlag
• Subjects: Behavioral Science and Psychology; Clergy; Cognitive Psychology; Cognitive science; Comprehension; Computational Linguistics; Cues; Guidelines; Humans; Hypotheses; Language; Language Processing; Linguistic Theory; Linguistics; Phrase Structure; Psycholinguistics; Psychology; Reading; Reading Comprehension; Reading Processes; Role; Semantics; Sentences; Taxonomy; Verbs; France; New York; United States > US; Text comprehension; Space; Adverbials; cohesion
• ISSN: 0090-6905; 1573-6555
• DOI: 10.1007/s10936-013-9279-x

A challenge for psycholinguistics is to describe how linguistic cues influence the construction of the mental representation resulting from the comprehension of a text. In this paper, we will focus on one of these linguistic devices: the sentence-initial positioning of spatial adverbials such as
In the park
... Three self-paced reading experiments were conducted to test the ‘Discourse Framing Hypothesis’ according to which preposed adverbials can be seen as frame builders announcing that incoming contents satisfy the same informational criterion specified by the adverbial. Our results indicate that spatial adverbials do not play the same role when they are in sentence-initial and in sentence-final position. These results are discussed in the framework of Zwaan’s Event Indexing Model.